The year 2022 marks the 75th anniversary of Anne Frank’s diary
- Anne Frank’s diary chronicles Anne’s experiences (15-year-old Jewish girl) during the second-word war, Nazi occupation of Holland.
- Anne Frank’s diary was first published in 1947
- The diary has been read by millions of people around the world and has been translated into dozens of languages.
- In 1999, the diary was included on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century.
- Anne’s Diary auctioned for 140,000 euros
Michael Rosen wrote poetry on the 75th anniversary of Anne Frank to pay tribute to the young writer and Holocaust victim.
Who is Michael Rosen?
- Michael Rosen is an author and poet who has written extensively on the subject of the Holocaust. Rosen explores the Chester mystery of why Anne Frank and her family were discovered by the Nazis.
Who was Anne Frank?
- Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929.
- In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Anne and her family moved to Amsterdam. In 1942,
- The family went into hiding to evade capture by the Nazis.
- For two years, they lived in a secret apartment behind Anne’s father’s office.
- In 1944, they were betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo.
- Anne and her sister, Margot, were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. Their mother died in Auschwitz.
- Anne and Margot were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they both died of typhus in 1945.
- Anne was 15 years old at the time of her death.
The Diary of a Young Girl: Anne Frank’s Book
- The Diary of a Young Girl, also known as The Diary of Anne Frank.
- It is a book of the writings by Anne Frank in her diary in Dutch-language, while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during the second World war.
- During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Anne Frank received a blank diary as one of her presents on 12 June 1942
- She entered a one-sentence note on her birthday, writing “I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.” The main diary was written from 14 June.
- The diary was retrieved by Miep Gies, who gave it to Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the only survivor of the family. The diary has been published in more than 70 languages.
- First published under the title Het Achterhuis.
- The book gives readers a taste of what it was like to live in hiding during the Nazi regime.
- Anne Frank regularly wrote in her diary, documenting both the mundane details of her daily life as well as her thoughts on world events and her own personal growth.
- The result is an intimate and moving portrait of a young girl struggling to maintain hope during some of the darkest days in human history.
- Her original diaries are written over three extant volumes.
- The first volume covers the period between 14 June and 5 December 1942.
- The second surviving volume (a school exercise book) begins on 22 December 1943, and ends on 17 April 1944,
- It is assumed that the original volume or volumes between December 1942 and December 1943 were lost, after the arrest, when the hiding place was emptied on Nazi instructions.
- This missing period is covered in the version Anne rewrote for preservation.
- The third existing volume (which was also a school exercise book) contains entries from 17 April to 1 August 1944, when Anne wrote for the last time three days before her arrest.
- The manuscript, written on loose sheets of paper, was found strewn on the floor of the hiding place by Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl after the family’s arrest
- The papers were given to Otto Frank after the war, when Anne’s death was confirmed in July 1945 by sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who was with Margot and Anne in Bergen-Belsen.
Anne’s diary & her Inspiration | letters to “Kitty
- The diary is a letter to oneself.
- Anne calls her diary “Kitty”,
- Almost all of the letters are written to Kitty.
- Anne used the above-mentioned names for her annex-mates in the first volume, from 25 September 1942 until 13 November 1942, when the first notebook ends.
- It is believed that these names were taken from characters found in a series of popular Dutch books written by Cissy van Marxveldt.
- Anne’s literary ambitions were inspired by a London radio broadcast made by the exiled Dutch Minister for Education, Art, and Science, Gerrit Bolkestein, calling for the preservation of “ordinary documents—a diary, letters … simple everyday material” to create an archive for posterity as a testimony to the suffering of civilians during the Nazi occupation on 29 March 1944.
- On 20 May 1944, she notes that she started re-drafting her diary with future readers in mind. She expanded entries and standardized them by addressing all of them to Kitty, clarified situations, prepared a list of pseudonyms, and cut scenes she thought would be of little interest or too intimate for general consumption. By the time she started the second existing volume, she was writing only to Kitty.
- Anne Frank betrayal suspect identified after 77 years – BBC News
Events: 75th anniversary of Anne Frank’s Diary
Google doodle celebrates the 75th anniversary of Anne Frank’s Diary
- Anniversary follows a central London event on Tuesday featuring a speech by actress Sarah Solemani, whose father is a retired Persian Jewish maths lecturer.
- Addressing the audience, she said: “We are here today to wake up, and to encourage our families and communities and countries to wake up, and affirm that racism, antisemitism, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, anti-humanity in all its forms, is a sickness with a changing face. It is the need to purge the country of one kind of human being.”
- Solemani said Anne Frank “wanted her writing to matter”, adding: “It does. She wanted to go on living after her death. She did. Her legacy is far more than the entries in her diary. It is the goodness in all of us who crave and cling to her words of hope, the handbook of hope.”
- Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich, who was in Bergen-Belsen at the same time as the young diarist, said: “Anne Frank has captured the hearts and minds of all young people of her generation and beyond; 75 years after publication, her book still inspires. Her wisdom and ideas at such a tender age were truly amazing.”
- Anne Frank Trust chief executive Tim Robertson said Anne’s diary was “a masterpiece that plays a unique global role in conveying the human impact of extreme antisemitism, especially to non-Jewish audiences”.
Theater and film on Anne Frank’s diary
- A play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich based on the diary won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955.
- A subsequent film version earned Shelley Winters an Academy Award for her performance. Winters donated her Oscar to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
- The first major adaptation to quote literal passages from the diary was 2014’s Anne, authorized and initiated by the Anne Frank Foundation in Basel. After a two-year continuous run at the purpose-built Theater Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the play had productions in Germany and Israel.
- The first German film version of the diary, written by Fred Breinersdorfer, was released by NBCUniversal in 2016. The film is derived from the 2014 Dutch stage production.
What is Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.